Oil, the Arab-Israel Dispute, and the Industrial World: Horizons of Crisis
Publisher: Routledge
Author(s): J.C. Hurewitz
Date: 2019
Topics: Dispute Resolution/Mediation, Extractive Resources
Countries: Israel
One of the most stubborn global problems in the last quarter of the twentieth century, a problem that affects the rich states and the poor, the industrial and the nonindustrial, is the use of energy. The management of the problem entails a great deal more than just the search for new sources of oil, the conversion of other fossil fuels, and the development of new forms of energy. It requires the framing of comprehensive policies on conservation by national governments in cooperation with international agencies, policies that will take into account the ways in which we have become locked into wasteful uses of wasting natural resources. This is particularly true of the industrial states, which are by far the largest energy consumers. In the United States alone, which accounts for one-third of the world's daily energy use, it will probably take the rest of the century to reshape the systems of transportation, the heating and cooling of buildings, and the running of industrial machinery-to mention only the major forms of energy use.
The project, of which this book is the product, was not expressly interested in these aspects of the energy crisis. The technical issues have been the concern of the US Federal Energy Administration and the Energy Research and Development Agency and their counterparts in other countries as well as the International Energy Agency, the OECD, the Common Market, oil companies, academic institutions, and individual scholars. Their work has been used as part of the evidence. The participants in this project considered, primarily, the political economy of the energy crisis.